Cult of Luna and Julie Christmas – Mariner (Review)

Cult of Luna are a Post-Metal band from Sweden and Julie Christmas is a US solo artist and ex-member of such bands as Battle of Mice and Made out of Babies.

Well, this is a bit exciting. Cult of Luna are one of my favourite bands and Julie Christmas is one of my favourite vocalists. Put them together, and I can’t see how this could be anything short of amazing.

To cut a long story short, I was right.

This is essentially Cult of Luna, in all of their resplendent glory, with Julie Christmas’ soul-shocking vocals added into the mix. It’s a stunning and winning combination and adds another aspect to Cult of Luna that you never even knew was missing.

We get five songs, spanning 56 minutes. As you would expect, each track is the embodiment of what Post-Metal can be at its absolute best, with the creativity and inventiveness that helped shaped a rather amorphous genre into what it is today in full effect.

Although this very much feels like a Cult of Luna album, Julie Christmas’ influence should not be overlooked. Which is a silly thing to write, really, as how could someone with her voice ever be overlooked? It’s just not happening. She has such a charismatic, emphatic and powerful voice that it really stands out as something special. Combined with the music on Mariner she just shines.

I swear, parts of this album almost bring me to tears, the hairs stand up, blah blah blah, whatever; it does its job well and elicits a powerful emotional response. At times it’s almost just too much; Mariner is so good it hurts.

In many ways there’s not much to say about a release like this, other than it’s just so mind-numbingly essential it’s just silly. Ideally it should just be stamped with the words MANDATORY all over it and given to everyone. If this doesn’t end up near the very top of my end of year list for 2016 then it will have been a shockingly good year for music.